ART/ARCHITECTURE

ART/ARCHITECTURE; Testimony of a Keen Witness To Sicily's Enduring Sorrow

By VICKI GOLDBERG

Published: December 16, 2001

ALTHOUGH television delivers the news instantly and graphically, it still has not pushed old-fashioned photographs out of the picture. Old-fashioned in the sense of being unmanipulated, whether taken with a digital camera or on photographic film; old-fashioned in the sense of bearing witness, providing evidence, even transmitting some believable kernel of truth; old-fashioned in the sense of forceful enough to affect opinion.

Photography has never stopped doing this, no matter how many wise thinkers have brought to light the medium's glaring vulnerabilities. The career of Letizia Battaglia, who was the photography director of a left-wing newspaper in Palermo, Sicily, from 1974 to 1990, provides a remarkable example of still photographs that made a difference, in part because they were only one element in Ms. Battaglia's political engagement. ''Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom -- Photographs of Sicily,'' an exhibition of 56 pictures at Aperture's Burden Gallery on East 23rd Street (through January), is the first comprehensive show of her work. (Aperture published a book by the same name in 1999.)

The photographs cover a wide spectrum of Sicilian life, for Ms. Battaglia took some 600,000 images as she covered the territory for the paper. She is a fine photojournalist, more concerned with getting the message across than with flamboyant camera work, keenly attuned to the telling emotional moment.

She photographed some good times, but focused more often on the constant tragedy that is Sicily -- a child crying in a room so badly cracked that the house collapsed moments after the picture was taken; a woman with three children who, too tired to respond to her newborn's crying one night, discovered in the morning that a rat had gnawed off one of his fingers. Only the captions reveal these stories; photographs have their limits.

She photographed the rich as well, looking rich, as they are meant to do. She photographed the extraordinary hold religion has on people without a great deal of hope in the present. They cry as the crucifix passes by in procession. The bare back of a murdered man is tattooed with a large image of Jesus's head crowned with thorns.

She photographed the Mafia, too, and the effects of its siege on Sicilian life, eroded by poverty, despair and continual violence. A young girl's face harbors a century's worth of trouble and fear. Two boys too young for real guns brandish toys that are near-perfect copies while a friend too old to suck his thumb does so anyway.

With a little background about Ms. Battaglia's life, this show tells a story of photography and commitment that contributed to change, if only in making people so aware of how bad things were that they could no longer easily ignore or deny reality.

According to one of the essays in the book, so many Sicilians lived, or had to live, somewhere outside the law that they were wary of the authorities and became, in effect, allies of the Mafia. Then, too, Italians generally dismissed Sicilian killings as a local matter between gangsters and failed to understand how deeply organized crime had penetrated society and politics. But the killings escalated to a point where they could not be dismissed when a war broke out between rival Mafia factions in the late 1970's and people brave enough to go after the killers were relentlessly assassinated.

Ms. Battaglia photographed the dead so often that she was like a roving morgue. ''Suddenly,'' she said, ''I had an archive of blood.'' One corpse lay beneath a sheet with blood strains seeping through as if to make a mask for eyes and nose; others slumped in cars where they had been shot in broad daylight in front of their wives. She photographed the survivors, too, women stunned by grief, people weeping as funerals passed by. Soon she, too, was threatened with death, yet she kept on, afraid every day, like a war photographer in an undeclared war.

With her companion, Franco Zecchin, Ms. Battaglia not only photographed for the newspaper but also put up exhibitions of anti-Mafia pictures in schools and on streets where no one could avoid seeing them. Mr. Zecchin believes that photography had a powerful effect. Criminals have long known that photographs could be dangerous: in pictures Ms. Battaglia took at a trial of 114 people for Mafia-related crimes, some of the accused cover their faces with their hats. It would be useful to know whether and how often newspapers in mainland Italy published such images.

PROBABLY the Mafia itself, by so feverish a murder campaign, undermined the immunity it had acquired through fear, the corruption of politicians and the collusive silence of the church and intellectuals. Photography seems to have helped mobilize public opinion by putting a hideous and memorable face on a situation that everyone deplored but few truly grasped or were willing to confront. Something like this happened during the American civil rights movement, when Northerners began to see horrifying pictures of the violence of Southern segregation.

In 1993, when prosecutors in Palermo indicted Giulio Andreotti, who had been prime minister of Italy seven times, the police searched Ms. Battaglia's archives and found two 1979 photographs of Mr. Andreotti with an important Mafioso he had denied knowing. Aside from the accounts of turncoats, these pictures were the only physical evidence of this powerful politician's connections to the Sicilian Mafia. The documentary and historical significance of photographs, including standard newspaper coverage, could not be more clear.

As she has been battling truly fierce dragons, Ms. Battaglia's struggle has by no means entirely succeeded, but changes have come to Palermo. She has attacked many kinds of social problems, with various weapons. She made a film with psychiatric patients; she and Mr. Zecchin set up a photography school and gallery in Palermo; she started a women's theater project and a women's newspaper; and she ran a small publishing house. In 1985, she stopped taking photographs to go into politics, and has since been a municipal councilwoman twice and a regional deputy once. In her political capacity she helped save the historic district of Palermo, which the Mafia was destroying in order to get lucrative construction contracts. Later she returned to photography.

Her parents may not have known how aptly they were naming her. Letizia means joy in Italian; battaglia means what it sounds like: battle.

Photos: Letizia Battaglia's images of Palermo: at left, in 1976, the aftermath of a shooting; at right, in 1997, a mother holding a baby whose finger was eaten by rats. (Photographs by Letizia Battaglia/Aperture Foundation)